30th São Paulo Biennial, 2012

A iminência das poéticas

[The Imminence of Poetics]

According to the first statements by the curatorial team, composed of Luis Pérez-Oramas, as chief curator, André Severo and Tobi Maier, as associated curators, and Isabela Villanueva, as assistant curator, the next edition of the São Paulo Biennial will focus on "the multiplicity, transitionality, recurrence, and permanent mutability of the artistic poetics: their aesthetic and political topology, their survival, alterations, their diverse forms of eloquence and derivations; retours, reverses, regressions, progress, assimilations, condensations, and deformations."

With poetics, the curators refer to "the instrumental repertoire that allows an individual or a community, a discipline or tradition, to establish –in an intuitive form, intentionally or unconsciously– the strategies or discursive platforms that make possible expressive acts or that materialize in expressive decisions of artistic character."

"Poetics are a limited repertoire of statements or acts of enunciation within an artistic field (a practice), a tradition or a historic-cultural space. In this sense, the poetics can have a major or minor collective or temporal relevance, a major or minor pertinence and efficacy. The temporality of poetics is different from the temporality of fashion, as well as of history: poetics are acts and as such, they always become present; they are on the verge of being materialized; are unpredictable. Like 'the word on the tip of the tongue', these discursive acts –that also include the modalities of suspension and interruption of the discourse– receive nourishment from previous discursive densities, from an organic memory of discursive or expressive acts that precede them and feed them, being altered, deformed, assimilated every time - in their unthinkable advent."

A transversal zone is included as well, based on the idea of "Poetic Reverses", or the reverse as action in-between these four concepts.

In the construction of the Biennial the main working instrument will be the idea of constellation, and the leitmotiv, the notion of articulation. "More than a Biennial of individual artworks and artists, the 30th Biennial will be an event to compose constellations of artworks and artists dialoguing among themselves, even beyond their programmatic reasons: a platform that allows the vicinity between works and artists to be an effective dispositive of renovation and production of sense and meaning."

The participating artists of the 30th Biennial will be announced in January 2012, but some names are being mentioned already: Arthur Bispo do Rosário (* around 1909 in Japaratuba, Brazil; + 1989 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Waldemar Cordeiro (* 1925 Rome, Italy; + 1973 São Paulo, Brazil), and Hans-Peter Feldmann (* 1941 Hilden, Germany).

From 3 to 7 October 2011, 12 participants selected from an open call joined 5 invited designers and the 4 curators in a workshop to elaborate the visual identity of the 30th São Paulo Biennial. The final results will be disclosed at the end of November.